Don't Bet the Farm on One AI Vendor

Benchmark leadership in frontier AI has been changing on a roughly quarterly cadence. The model that's best for your hardest workload today is unlikely to be best in eighteen months. That's not a knock on any vendor — it's the shape of the market.

And yet IT organizations keep signing three-year exclusive deals as if this were a normal enterprise software cycle. It isn't. Locking in for years on a market that re-ranks itself in months is a structural bet that the current leader will keep leading. The recent track record says otherwise.

The architecture answer is portability. Abstract the model behind an interface your application owns. Keep prompts, evals, and tool definitions in your repo, not in a vendor console. Use protocols — MCP, OpenAPI, plain HTTP — instead of proprietary SDKs whenever the tradeoff is reasonable.

The procurement answer is shorter contracts and multi-vendor optionality. Sign for the term that matches your switching cost, not the term that gets you the deepest discount. A 15% discount on a three-year deal is a bad trade if it costs you the right to use a model that's twice as good in year two.

Dataken's stance is explicit: model-agnostic by design. OLi is built so customers can swap the underlying model as the frontier moves, without rewriting the agents on top. That's not a hedge — that's the only honest architecture for a market this volatile.